Heroic Baleroc. The “healers” fight for this expansion. I think I’m going to rename it to “the fight where your disc priests and paladins completely kick your ass!”. I jest! In all honesty, when push comes to shove, this fight is more about the raids situational awareness and ability to meet the enrage timer than it is about the healing. I’d say that it’s probably 60% situational awareness, 20% DPS, 10% healing and 10% OH GOD TANK USE ANOTHER COOLDOWN! There are a lot of moving factors with the encounter, but once you get it down, it’s a lot of fun. Oh, and don’t sit idle if you are told that you can’t heal this fight. We used a 1 paladin, 2 disc priest and 2 resto druid healing combination to learn the encounter and repeat our kill. We are absolutely viable on this encounter ;)

With such a quick encounter, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time in the videos for much information outside of just walking through how I heal, so there are quite a few tips that I couldn’t get into the video below!

As always, please note that this video is best viewed in one of the higher resolutions.

A few tips!

Save your glory for another fight. You will not be able to keep up with your Holy Paladins and Disc Priests on this encounter. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try! Just don’t be discouraged if they more than double your healing done. To give you an example, on our second kill I think I ranked like 68th in the world on WoL at ~23k HPS while our disc priest ranked at only 123 with just under 42k HPS. Also, don’t fight your disc priests and your paladins for the chance to supercharge their spark stacks. They have the best tools to keep your tanks alive on this fight, and they really are going to be your strongest healers for that job. It’s ok! You are still viable, but they truly should get the juicy roles this time!

Don’t Believe Everything You See. While both Skada and Recount do a fair job in attempting to track absorbs, they aren’t 100% accurate, especially on this encounter. I don’t know why, but they seem to struggle in allocating which absorbs are being used. You can see in the video the pink bar just dominates across the top of my healing/absorb meter. However, when you upload the parse into WoL it tells you a vastly different story. The reason that I’m sharing this is so that if you have struggles while learning the fight, you know not to rely solely on recount/skada to review what may be healing issues.

Power Building Spark Stacks. You probably heard me mention “Power building” a few times. Let me explain what that is! For our first two ranged shards we have a shadow priest that “solos” the shard. This allows the healers that are on that shard to build stacks very, very quickly. The way that this works is that at 11 stacks the shadow priest gets a Pain Suppression. At 19 stacks the shadow priest disperses. By the end of the shard, they will have ~25 stacks of torment and healers that are focused on them can really juice up their vital spark stacks. The two healers who will be the main healers focused on the tank should be assigned to these two shards so that they can build >100 spark stacks in that time and focus solely on the tanks after that. (You will notice that in the video I mention I try to sneak a few quick heals in to boost my stacks as well).

The Numbers. We use 2 tanks, 5 healers and 18 dps for this encounter. This really requires your DPS to push themselves hard to meet the enrage timer (you saw we came just short of it in the video). Some people utilize a one tank strategy for the encounter, but that puts a lot of extra burden on your healers during decimation blade. A two tank strategy is the more stable strategy if you have the DPS to navigate the encounter. As a side note, our first kill also came just shy of the DPS timer, but our OT that night (a feral druid aka Brade) saw it coming and lined up some hefty magic (aka hax druid cooldowns) and was able to tank out the last few seconds of the fight after the Inferno Blade tank died.

The Healing. We set up the fight in the following fashion. Shard 1: Disc/Paladin ranged shard (shadow priest), Resto Druid melee shard, Disc/Resto Druid Baleroc Tank. Shard 2: The same as Shard 1, only the paladin swaps over to the Baleroc tank when his shadow priest is at ~19-20 stacks of torment to help smooth the transition. Shard 3: Disc/Paladin/Druid on Baleroc Tank, Disc on ranged shard, Druid on melee shard. Shard 4: Disc/Druid on Baleroc Tank, Paladin builds stacks, Disc/Druid same as shard 3. Shard 5: Disc/Paladin on Baleroc tank, Druid on tank/building sparks as able, Disc/Druid same as Shard 3. All remaining shards are the same as Shard 5. Now, there are a few times that the healers change. If one of the two torment healers receives the tormented debuff, they are paired off with another healer and they swap assignments while tormented is active. So the tormented healer heals the tanks, while the non-tormented healer heals the shards. Our disc priests are paired up and our resto druids are paired up. Now, if BOTH end up having tormented, other healers need to step in and help with the torment targets. This healing strategy may not work for everyone, but works well for us.

Tormented. This is really the bane of this encounter! It is essential to have a game plan for how to deal with back ups when one of your shard soakers has tormented. It’s also pretty important for you melee to have a “game plan” for how to move, so that they don’t infect each other. We work out back ups in advance, and often have to have a ranged back up step in to help the melee. The biggest piece of advice that I can give anyone about dealing with the tormented debuff is to have good communication. Once you work that out, the debuff becomes a lot easier to manage. The second piece of advice that I can give regarding it is to set designated “clean” areas that people should stand in if they aren’t afflicted with torment and “dirty” areas where they should be if they are. This should help prevent unintentional spread of the debuff around the raid.

MORE DODGE! I can’t say that I know a lot about tanking this fight, and I’m not going to pretend that I can give you much advice on that front. However, I will say that your decimation blade tank will be your healer’s best friend if s/he can dodge as many of those decimation blades as possible. Decimation blade tanks should work to build avoidance sets specifically for this fight. How they go about doing that is beyond my knowledge, but I’m sure you can find the information with a few clicks and a google search!

I almost forgot! Power Auras! I added two new auras for this encounter. One to let you know when you have the tormented debuff and one to let you know that you have countdown and how much time is left on the debuff.

Once your healers get into a groove, this fight really becomes less about the healing and more about the raid focusing weaving through the torment mechanics. Between the video and what I posted above, I think I covered most everything, but if you have any questions (or I missed something!) please don’t hesitate to let me know! Good Luck and Have Fun!

Hey, your write up has been very useful in showing me an different way in setting up the healing, but your “The Healing” section is quite confusing, because you refer to both your discs and both your druids by “disc” and “druid”. I have no way of telling which is which! I am trying to go through your video now and figure it out though.

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